One of our favorite ways to team up with musicians is by soundboarding questions, thoughts & ideas through emails! We guarantee we'll listen & respond with resources, insight or ideas.

Below is a real soundboarding exchange in case it can help inspire your music journey, too!

Musician:
I have been trying to bump up my exposure etc. I am really looking into advertising myself. I am considering price shopping for a billboard (do you think it’s worth it?). Also, I would love to ask around to different local businesses about advertising me. How would be best to go about that? What should I supply them with? Should I be offering them money? Do you have any sites or companies you use or have heard good things about for advertising? Are there any specific things I should be looking for/doing?

The Marketing Mixtape:
Really good questions. When it comes to paid advertising (any time you invest $ for direct exposure to a specific group), it's important to know what you're looking to DO. What is your "ask" - for example, do you want: video views (#), single downloads ($), single streams (#)? This will help you determine what is actually on your advertisement, and to some extent, WHERE you advertise.

I haven't worked with an artist on a physical billboard campaign before, but I know it'll be hard to measure the results and how effective it is (ex. how many people saw it and did the action you want them to BECAUSE they saw it). If you wanted to get a billboard and promote the fact that you have a billboard on social media, that could offer an added 'bump' for exposure online, but I'm not sure I would prioritize it, personally, over a slightly-more-direct approach on a digital platform like Facebook or YouTube, for example.

In terms of what you're looking for when it comes to a paid advertising campaign, the main thing you want to find out is "worth" - what can you expect to get from what you invest? The boring word for it is "return on investment" or "ROI" - with an advertisement, you have to know what you want first (the ASK) so you can identify the metric (usually a # number or $ dollar amount) that will help you know if you're succeeding. Example - you want to: increase video views ... your metric is: the video view count.

To do a paid advertisement well, you'll need to target the right fans based on demographic info (age, gender, location, etc.) + interest-based psychographics (ex. relevant genres, similar artists), with the right visual + text message to get their attention. This is easier to do and track online, instead of somewhere like a physical billboard... as it's hard to measure how many views came from a tangible billboard vs. an online campaign (where it's very easy to see & track the numbers).